Isabella SCHLEHAIDER
Abstract. By understanding metaphysics as historically embedded and situated practice, Whitehead rejects its classical claims to ultimate groundings, certainty and universal truth. More so, for Whitehead, in light of various difficulties, any foundationalist claim is a display of philosophical naiveté. For Whitehead, metaphysics can only ever offer a provisional conceptual framework and must be understood as an infinite, indeed adventurous endeavor. Metaphysical principles can never be more than propositions, in fact metaphors that require constant review, revision or even rejection. This notion of metaphysics as fallible marks Whitehead’s defeat of the “god trick” of Modern schemes of thought, “a conquering gaze from nowhere”. And this fallibilismis also why, for Whitehead, the relevance of a proposition, its ability to produce “consequential meanings” or “important knowledge” for a specific context, is ultimately more important than its logical value. However, and this is all the more important to emphasize in times of so-called post-truth politics, Whitehead’s particular pragmatism is by no means a plea for crude relativism. Without abandoning the commitment to “faithful accounts of a ‘real’ world”, Whitehead’s own speculative propositions attempt to account for both the contingency of all knowledge claims and the pragmatic call “to making a difference” by widening the scope of experience and thereby luring the world in a different, more livable direction. In what follows, I will show the extent to which Whitehead’s notion of metaphysics, theory production and truth can indeed, and in many respects, be considered critical posthumanist. To this end, I will first set out Whitehead’s theory of the bifurcation of nature, since it is this assessment that leads him not only to construct a different metaphysics, but also to propose a different notion of metaphysics. By then clarifying Whitehead’s understanding of the purpose of philosophy and introducing some key ideas of his Philosophy of Organism, I will show why and in what way thinking with Whitehead and making use of some of his ideas is an asset to critical posthumanist theorizing.
Keywords: A.N. Whitehead, Metaphysics, Truth, Theory Production, Philosophy of Nature, Critical Posthumanism